One of the things that I've learned over my years at EchoDitto — that's been hammered home again and again — is the importance of email. Twitter's cool, social networking is great, but your online strategy absolutely has to account for email. It's not glamorous, but it's important.

It was too terribly long ago that I posted a simple Twitterbot here. I'm sure you'll be absolutely shocked to learn that it had a few, uh, shortcomings. If you're making a TwitterBot (and particularly one in Ruby), here's some advice:

I've written my fair share of fly-by-night SMS services. Not for clients, of course — when someone needs a mobile campaign we talk to folks who live and breath text messaging. But I've hacked together a few hobby SMS apps on the cheap.